Cloud cost reduction

Cloud bills grow quietly. Environments are left running, services are sized for a peak that never comes, and architectures that made sense at the start keep costing money long after the reason for them has gone.

What I look at

• Where the money actually goes, broken down by service, environment and team.
• Waste: idle and forgotten resources, over-provisioned services, and non-production environments that never switch off.
• Architecture: whether always-on servers should be serverless (or the other way round), whether managed services are earning their premium, and whether data is stored and moved in sensible ways.
• Commitments: reservations and savings plans, where the usage is steady enough to justify them.
• Where it runs: for some workloads the cheapest option is to leave the public cloud altogether. I’ve written about choosing between cloud, on-premises and colocation.

What you get

A prioritised list of changes, each with its expected saving, its risk and its effort, so you can start with the quick wins. If you want, I’ll then make the changes with your team.

Experience

• More than ten years of Azure, and three years of AWS. I’m a Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert.
• IMServ: co-led the cloud architecture for a smart-metering digital transformation, including automation to create and tear down environments on demand, for faster iteration and lower cost.
• A consistent theme of my work: pragmatic trade-offs between cloud cost and reliability, rather than chasing one at the expense of the other.

Cutting waste saves energy as well as money. That’s part of why efficiency matters to me.